


Mine Own Weak Merits

by treepyful (treeperson)



Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Insecurity, Intergenerational friendship, Phone Calls, Post-Canon, Support, and the people who make them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-19
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-03-16 04:28:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28700685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/treeperson/pseuds/treepyful
Summary: When her phone buzzed with a silent call for the third time in eight minutes, Stevie debated throwing it out her open window.
Relationships: Stevie Budd & Moira Rose
Comments: 28
Kudos: 41
Collections: Schitt's Creek Season 7





	Mine Own Weak Merits

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [SCSeason7](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/SCSeason7) collection. 



> **Prompt:**
> 
> 7x06 - It's Moira's first day of shooting on the Sunrise Bay reboot, and despite her excitement, she's having some first day jitters. Who does she call to try to soothe her nerves? Bonus points if it's not one of her immediate family members!
> 
> ***
> 
> Thank you to singsongsung for helping me pin down Moira and providing character voice reassurance!
> 
> Title from _Othello_.

When her phone buzzed with a silent call for the third time in eight minutes, Stevie debated throwing it out her open window. Uninterrupted sleep would probably be worth the price of a new phone, her monkey brain explained to her. Phones don’t cost _that_ many shiny stones to replace, after all, and sleep is very important. But her human brain woke up in time to prevent any technology defenestration and she shoved the phone under her pillow instead, stifling the vibrations in a general way while simultaneously managing to direct the leftover escapees smack dab into her skull.

The red numbers of her ancient clock radio glowed from the edge of her desk, a dragon’s eyes protecting its hoard of 90s music and one embarrassingly outdated computer. One-oh-four, they read, then blinked over to one-oh-five as she watched.

Three times in eight minutes was a lot, Stevie reasoned. It was probably important. She should probably answer it.

Maybe she could just transmit the pillow-muffled call vibrations through her head and interpret whatever information she was supposed to absorb that way. That sounded like how phones could work. Possibly.

Probably not.

Stevie slid carefully out of bed, moving slowly to avoid disturbing the figure asleep on the other side, and nabbed her bathrobe off the clothes chair to wrap around herself. The phone stopped vibrating as she stepped into her washroom, but she’d bet any money it was going to start again very shortly so she just shut the door and flicked on the little under-vanity lamp, squinting against the weak yellow light as it stabbed her eyeballs. She sat down heavily on the closed toilet lid and waited, with head propped on hand, for her night to get worse.

 _Mr. Rose_ , the call display read for the fourth time in ten minutes.

With a steadying breath and a short prayer to the ceiling for patience, Stevie swiped her thumb over the accept icon.

“Mr. Rose, did you forget about time zones again? It’s aft—”

“Stevie, darling! I’m so glad you called!”

Stevie blinked, mouth hanging open mid-word. That was not Mr. Rose, that was— “Mrs. Rose, you’re the one who called me.” At one in the morning, she didn’t add. On your husband’s phone, she also didn’t add.

“Oh, details, tedious minutiae, and completely beside the point.”

“The point?” It was too early— late— one a.m., it was too one a.m. for a conversation to start like this. A Stevie who had been woken up from a blissful sleep was a Stevie who needed directness in language, which, knowing Mrs. Rose, was not likely to happen.

“The point, Stevie,” Mrs. Rose continued, the humour in her voice making it very evident that she felt the clarification was unnecessary, “is that we’re speaking to each other on the telephone and that’s exactly what needed to happen right now.”

It was like talking to a book of riddles. Or the Cheshire Cat.

“Could you explain to me why that is?”

“Why, because I start on the set of our prodigious revival tomorrow morn, of course!”

Oh, right. David had mentioned something like that the other day. “Of course.” There was a beat of silence and Stevie felt like pulling a Jim Halpert and looking into the camera. “I guess I’m still not seeing what that has to do with calling me?”

“Well, everyone’s going to be there! They managed to get quite a few of the old cast back, not just me. Harold’s come back, which is simply marvelous, and they just signed Evelyn, and Frederick, despite his hair situation. Georgia as well, though she’s playing her old character’s sister because they killed her character off – succumbed to some sort of avian flu, I believe.”

Why was this happening. Why. What did Stevie do to deserve this. She made a mental note to send an accusatory text to David – possibly just a series of question marks with zero context – because this was undoubtedly his fault somehow.

“And Clifton is going to be there, too,” Mrs. Rose blithely continued, either unaware or uncaring of what Stevie’s lack of response meant. “But only for the first two episodes – then he’s going to get his necktie trapped in a piece of farm machinery, ha, bound up in a bale of hay like the pickled frog that he is. I had a good laugh over that when I thought it up. It’s going to be very cathartic, Stevie.”

“I bet.” 

“Oh, and Nicole, of course. We had a bit of a palaver last week at the table read – she’s an absolute delight of a woman, can’t wait to work with her. Can’t wait to work with everyone, really! We’re all eager to get this show on the road, to breathe some life into these dusty old characters again,” Mrs. Rose concluded, the last few words sounding a bit like they were too big for her throat.

Stevie, whose eyes had started to glaze over in their usual _listening to a Rose Ramble_ manner, startled. That – that was _teary_ , wasn’t it? Mrs. Rose sounded teary. With a firm shake of her head, Stevie banished the last remnants of sleep fog and sharply tuned her dials to refocus on the conversation.

“That sounds like it’ll be a great time, Mrs. Rose.”

“Oh, it certainly will be! We always were a saturnalian crew, and I’m sure the new additions will only make it all the more whimsical. It’s been such a long time, you know, and I haven’t seen some of these people in more than twenty-five years! Twenty-five, Stevie! That’s longer than you’ve been alive!” 

Wow, not quite. “Uh—”

“And we’ve come back together now to rebirth our beloved show! What joy, Stevie,” she said, sounding completely joyless.

“Mrs. Rose?” Stevie asked, unsure of what was happening in the space that the silence left behind.

The response was very quiet and Stevie had to strain to hear, pressing her phone to her ear hard enough to hurt. “I’m no longer the actress they think I am.”

Stevie didn’t know what to do with that. “Oh?”

“You know, I started on _Sunrise Bay_ when David was but an infant, a bébé in arms. He was so young. I was so young! So naïve! So energetic! They knew me as a vivacious, sprightly little slip of a thing. I, I was drunk most of the time, or high, or low, very low, and I was a brilliant flame of vitality through it all!”

Silence hung for a few long seconds before Stevie realised she was supposed to say something, her minor part required to cue the rest of Mrs. Rose’s lines. “And that was a good thing?” she asked, trailing a finger along the lines of her tattoo where the bathrobe had slipped off her thigh.

“Certainly! It made me exactly what they wanted for Doctor Vivien Blake, Head of Surgery at Sunrise General. I was a rollercoaster of delight, unpredictable and divine, and I got us the number one spot for years! And I really did love those years, Stevie. I was in my element.”

“I bet you were.”

“So you understand that I’m no longer that person.”

“Yes.” Generally – Mrs. Rose still wasn’t exactly the most stable.

The intake of breath down the phone line was suddenly shuddery and Stevie instantly felt extremely out of her element.

“How can I be the Vivien they’re expecting if I’m no longer the person who played her?”

Fuck. Why did people think Stevie was a good person to come to for comfort? She was objectively terrible at it, ask anyone. “Well,” Stevie started, fumbling around for words as she went, “you’re an actress. A good actress. So I imagine you’d just... act like Vivien?”

“Nicole Kidman is a good actress, Stevie; I am a soap opera actress.” Stevie couldn’t think of a time when she’d heard Mrs. Rose sound so subdued and it was a little worrying. “I wasn’t personally invited to work across from Reese Witherspoon on a critically acclaimed and award-winning murder drama, but Nicole was. Nor, I believe, has Nicole ever been in the running for longest demonic possession. We wield different... touches in our work, I suppose.”

“Oh,” Stevie said, because she was a conversational wizard.

Stevie tilted her head back to stare up at the ceiling, glaring at the peeling paint like it could solve her problems with enough convincing. Talking Mrs. Rose down was not a Stevie thing. It was a Mr. Rose thing. Or a David thing. Shit, Alexis had to be better at this than Stevie, whose entire experience in handling Mrs. Rose when she was upset was simply to get away as quickly as possible. The equivalent strategy on the phone would be to hang up, but Stevie couldn’t bring herself to be that blatantly rude, not to Mrs. Rose, no matter how crazy or frighteningly sedate she was being. Handing her off to someone else, though... well, that might be doable.

“Uh, Mrs. Rose, can I ask why you’re talking to me about this? Isn’t Mr. Rose there with you?” 

“Oh, yes, John’s just in the other room, dead asleep, the poor dear.” Mrs. Rose had returned to her normal voice, a quiet melody that gave absolutely nothing of her distress away, and Stevie truly did not understand the distinction between _soap opera actress_ and _good actress_. “But no, I called you, Stevie. You know Johnny, he’d say all the right things and smooth everything over and make it all perfectly copacetic, and I love him for it, don’t misunderstand. That’s usually exactly what I need, someone to fan away the misery and show me my shining starlight.” Mrs. Rose went quiet for a moment and Stevie could hear a rhythmic tapping start up in the background, like fingernails cascading over glass. 

“But he won’t tell me the truth,” she continued. “God love him, he’ll lie through his beautiful little teeth if he thinks that’s what I need to feel better, and it often is, so it works. You, however, I know I can trust you to tell me the facts of the matter, Stevie. You would be brutal if I needed you to be, happy to wield the whip or rip down the veil in order to set me right.”

Stevie recoiled from the phone. “That’s a bit much, Mrs. Rose.” She liked to think she was – deep down, perhaps – a decent person, yet the picture Mrs. Rose was painting wasn’t a particularly flattering one.

“It’s a compliment, Stevie. Really, you must learn to accept them gracefully.”

“Well, then, thank you.” That was probably an ignorable level of sarcasm, hurrah. Not that Mrs. Rose was one to follow up on Stevie’s sarcastic quips anyway.

There was a time when Stevie thought she had her whole life figured out. It wasn’t glamourous or exciting or even particularly interesting, even to herself, but it was comfortably predictable. She worked her hours at the almost empty motel, took home her barely acceptable paycheque, drank cheap wine by herself or cheap beer with people she didn’t like, and just kept her wheel of life turning over and over, going nowhere but mostly okay with it.

Then the goddamn Roses had shown up and changed everything.

Reaching for a sense of calm, Stevie fell back on a technique she’d developed not long after Roland had first shown Mr. Rose into the office and requested two comped rooms: perspective. The Roses were a whirlwind, whipping into Schitt’s Creek and Stevie’s boring little life at high speed, and sometimes she’d just needed to look at things from the outside in order to keep her feet on level ground.

So, here she sat, buck naked but for a bathrobe and perched on the edge of her chipped turquoise toilet, talking an aging former-soap-opera-starlet-turned-B-movie-actress-turned-prime-time-leading-lady off a ledge made entirely of superficially presented but very legitimately placed bricks. 

No, that still sounded ridiculous.

She tried again: her lover was asleep in the next room, her washroom was dim because the overhead light was indelibly connected to the obnoxiously loud fan, and her business-partner’s-wife-slash-best-friend’s-mother-slash-previous-freeloading-lodger was almost in tears on the phone three time zones away because she felt she couldn’t measure up to _Nicole Kidman_.

Right, things only seemed to get worse with perspective, so she scrapped that approach. Stevie wished she could have stayed at the monkey brain part of the evening. Seriously, what the fuck was her life.

But, unfortunately, there was nothing else to do. She couldn’t just abandon Mrs. Rose to her doubts, no matter how loudly her bed was calling to her. Staring down at her blue-painted toenails to make sure her feet didn’t get swept away, Stevie steeled herself.

“Can I ask you a question, Mrs. Rose?”

“I imagine you can, but you also may.”

Stevie was extremely glad that this was a voice-only call so that she didn’t have to stifle her intense eye roll at that. “Has Nicole Kidman ever done a soap?”

“Just some bit parts in Australia when she was young, I believe. And she was in _Moulin Rouge_ , which definitely has some soap opera qualities.”

Hmm, agree to disagree. “Okay, so you did soap operas for years, Mrs. Rose. And not just soap operas – _this_ soap opera. _Sunrise Bay_. Even if it’s prime time now, you’re the experienced one here, aren’t you? You know the tone of the show, and the history and the plot twists and all the characters. Isn’t there a different style of acting too?”

“I’m sure Nicole will be able to adapt, Stevie,” Mrs. Rose said, almost scolding.

“Okay, but you won’t have to adapt. You already know what you’re doing.”

“That’s perhaps a bit strong of an assertion.”

Stevie pressed her thumb into the space between her brows. “You told me once that I needed to learn which instincts to trust, that that was a skill all by itself.”

“That is ringing a vaguely familiar bell, yes.”

“And your instincts got you to push for changes in the Crows movie?”

“Yes...”

“And to turn down your first contract with _Sunrise Bay_?”

“No, that was Alexis who—”

“Right, so your instincts told you to trust her?”

“Well, I suppose if you want to look at it like that.”

“So which instincts are you trusting now? The ones you had when you forced your—your—your producer’s hand?” Fuck, was that the right term? Stevie did not know show business. “Or the ones you have now, which are all tangled up in being afraid of not being good enough?”

“I rather think they’re all the same instincts. Just confused, perhaps. The desire to get back at Clifton and Tippy was a strong one, and I may have inadvertently oversold my talents, even to myself.”

Stevie let out a slow, controlled breath and counted back from ten. It was fuck o’clock in the morning and there was someone in her bed who she’d like to get back to, so this whole... _thing_ had to stop. Now. “Mrs. Rose – if they didn’t think you were the best person for the job, they wouldn’t have given in to your fucking ridiculous contract demands. Who gets a diamond bracelet as payment? You do, because they need you. And yes, you’re different than you were during the original run, but I’m not seeing how that’s a bad thing? Vivien is going to be different after all that time, too.”

“But—”

“No, Mrs. Rose, let me finish,” Stevie snapped, her fragile patience completely evaporating. “Even if you walk on set tomorrow and everyone has a lightbulb moment where they realise that, hey, you’re a different person than you were _thirty years ago_ – which they would have to be deeply stupid to not have realised before now, let me be clear – it still doesn’t matter because _you are good at what you do_. You are a good actress. You can take whatever butchered version of Vivien they give you and make her shine. Alexis told me what you did in Bosnia, so I know you can work the script to make it suit you, to make it better, make the whole production better. You clearly know how to get people to listen to you and how to influence all the execs, or else you _wouldn’t even have this job_. Fuck Nicole Kidman, you’re Moira goddamn Rose and Vivien Blake is yours. _Sunrise Bay_ is yours. You know it, and they all do too.”

The silence that followed wasn’t absolute, as silences never are, but it came close. The remnants of Stevie’s tirade bounced off the tiled walls of her tiny washroom, and she could hear her heartbeat – fast, too fast – pounding in her ears, and Mrs. Rose’s hushed breathing on the end of the line. Stevie closed her eyes in frustration at her inability to keep her fucking temper in check and as the silence grew, expanding out from the phone and into Stevie’s mind, she started scrambling for words to throw an apology together.

“Well,” Mrs. Rose said, interrupting Stevie’s panic in a quiet but steady tone. “If you say so.”

Oh. Stevie cleared her throat. “I do, Mrs. Rose.”

“I asked you for the unfettered truth, and I can’t imagine you lie as passionately as all that, so I feel like I must believe you.”

“Mrs. Rose, I’m sor—"

“Thank you, Stevie. No,” she continued, rolling over Stevie’s protest, “thank you, for being precisely and exactly who you are and, coincidently, precisely and exactly who I needed you to be. You are a gift.”

Her cheeks hurt, Stevie realised, and she immediately tried to rein in her smile. “I, uh, thank you, Mrs. Rose.”

“Please, Stevie, call me Moira.”

“I—Okay. Thank you, Moira.” Not that Stevie would continue to call her that after this conversation, of course. She’d been caught up in Mrs. Rose’s inconsistencies too many times to trust a single invitation as a true one. Maybe if she insisted the next time they spoke, and the time after. Three times would probably be safe, given past patterns.

“My apologies about the late hour, as well. I imagine you weren’t keeping vigil at the witching hour and were instead awoken by my call.”

Just a few years ago, Stevie would have missed that little tone in Mrs. Rose’s voice. It was small, covered well by the flamboyance that was returning after the seriousness of the conversation, and even now she almost didn’t catch it. But it was there, a smug little note that lit a candle under Stevie’s ass. She narrowed her eyes, the pieces clicking together in the back of her brain as she stared a hole through her shower curtain. When she’d thought it was Mr. Rose calling, Stevie was under the assumption that he had – yet again – forgotten about the fact that their different time zones meant she would have been in bed. Now, however, Stevie was coming to the realisation that Mrs. Rose, who was occasionally quite shrewd in a way her husband never was, had very likely done it on purpose. Who was less likely to lie to protect someone’s feelings than Stevie? Grumpy, sleep-deprived Stevie, that’s who.

What a clever fucking woman. Goddamn. Stevie was impressed, if grudgingly. She’d let herself be more impressed in the morning.

Biting down on the smile yet again threatening to take over her mouth, Stevie snorted. “You’re right, you did wake me up. But thank you for apologising. Just make sure you remember about time zones next time,” she added on, letting her recognition colour her words slightly to show Mrs. Rose she was caught out.

But Mrs. Rose only hummed slightly, an annoyingly imperious sound. “I’ll be sure to do precisely that, Stevie.” Not a shred of acknowledgement, just her cool as a cucumber persona once more. Yeah, she was going to dominate this TV show – Stevie would bet her left tit on it.

“Well, I’ll let you go, Stevie. Do call again sometime, it was lovely to catch up with you.”

Stevie shook her head in disbelief. “Sounds like a plan, Mrs. R–” Her phone beeped and she pulled it away from her head to look at it. Yup, call ended. Classic.

Spinning her phone around and around in her hand, Stevie gave herself a moment to resettle her nerves. Close encounters of the Rose kind tended to require some time to recover from, and this one had been particularly odd. Particularly real, even. That, Stevie slowly realised, was probably the closest she had ever come to knowing who Mrs. Rose was underneath all of the characters and deflections and illusions. It was an oddly thrilling thing, like seeing a rare animal in the wild or a coveted vintage at the liquor store. She’d seen glimpses before, particularly during the run-up to Cabaret, but this – a late-night call asking for a shot of unvarnished truth – was vulnerable in a completely unexpected way. Stevie huffed out a quiet sound, halfway between a laugh and a sigh, and knew that she’d be thinking about this for weeks to come. She also knew she was smiling and didn’t bother to hide it this time – there was no one to see it, anyway.

Well, no one awake, at least. With that reminder, Stevie firmly tapped her phone onto Do Not Disturb and slipped out of the washroom, stripping her bathrobe off and sliding back between the cool sheets to snuggle up against the curved back of her bedmate.

“Y’okay?” The voice that rumbled up from the depths of the occupied pillow was deeper than usual, dragged through a throat made rough by sleep.

“Yeah, sorry, go back to sleep,” Stevie whispered, pressing a gentle kiss to the warm skin revealed by the shifting blankets. “I was just helping out a friend.”

**Author's Note:**

> Who is Stevie’s bed partner? Whomever you wish them to be! (Also, writing without pronouns is hard. 0/10, do not recommend.)


End file.
